Top Ten Lists of Top Ten Theater in 2012

Top Ten Theater of 2012. Shows in (or likely to be in) Top Ten lists of theater, from left: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (top); 4,000 Miles; Detroit; One Man, Two Guvnors; Falling

Here are the ten best plays or musicals that opened (mostly in New York) in 2012, according to 10 critics, including me.

First, a caveat: There are many good reasons why people complain about Top 10 lists, especially about the theater.

Theater goes by seasons, not by years, so these lists offer selections from two half-seasons.

How can you rank a Broadway musical for kids above or under a cutting-edge downtown theater piece? These are completely different experiences.

Why ten? Suppose there weren’t ten that you loved? It happens. Or what if you loved 20; how arbitrary is it to shunt aside half of your favorites?

There are thousands of shows that open in New York every year, some of startling originality or at least great promise, but they aren’t in the running because critics don’t have time to see them. Most critics have a mandate to see the same 100 or so shows with the biggest budgets and the longest runs, with only an occasional detour.

Most of the shows have closed, so what’s the point? Meanwhile shows you can see aren’t eligible because they opened in an earlier year.

I bet I could come up with five more reasons why top ten lists are pointless – and have a solid top ten list!

And I bet people would read my list – which is why editors like them so much.

(He cheats here and puts three plays in one, calling them the “black box configurations.”) Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present…, the Debate Society’s Blood Play, and the Mad Ones’ Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War

Detroit

Annie Baker’s Uncle Vanya

(Cheating again, under “the unmusicals”) Peter and the Starcatcher; The Old Man and the Old Moon;Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812; and One Man, Two Guvnors

This play by Lisa D’Amour takes place in a suburb of what is probably Detroit, but it could be any run-down first-generation suburb that began with hopefulness and street signs named after Nature. It is one of the few shows on a New York stage this year to address the effects of a faltering economy, and, while grounded in our current reality, it is also funny, dark and surreal, with a spot-on cast. Amy Ryan and David Schwimmer play a couple just hanging on who befriend new next-door neighbors Sarah Sokolovic and Darren Pettie who are even worse off.

The play has its flaws. I pick it as number one because 1. It was entertaining and timely at the same time and 2. I want to give some recognition to the theater that presented it, Playwrights Horizons, whose other impressive play this year, “The Whale” I could just as easily put in my top 10. This is a theater unafraid of presenting new work.

Deanna Jent, who is the mother of an autistic child, delivers a compelling and unsentimental portrait of a family dealing with a grown-up aggressive son, with a stand-out performance by an a actor previously known for her roles in musicals, Julia Murney.

If this is not my favorite Edward Albee play, there is still great pleasure in the wit and intensity of the writing 50 years after its Broadway debut, and the masterful acting of the four performers in this production, including the playwright Tracy Letts.

A triptych of plays taking place in the fictional Texas town of Harrison, by the under-rated playwright Horton Foote, who will be represented on Broadway this season with a revival of A Trip To Bountiful starring Cicely Tyson and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

I compared this fifth production of Arthur Miller’s everyman tragedy to “Mad Men” with which it shares some things. But there is none of the ironic distance in “Death of A Salesman,” which speaks more to our tough times with its tale of an average man who fights off disillusion and defeat with spirited American delusion. But even if it were not so timely, the play derives its continued power because the audience identifies with the authenticity and intensity of the relationships.

This was a solo show at the Fringe, in which an actor performed an essay written by an actual military interrogator in Iraq. It was compelling theater, in which the performer subtly showed the toll the experience took, and it only lasted 35 minutes.

Eddie Antar’s surreal comedy imagined what would happen if your GPS car navigator not only had a mind of her own, but was also clairvoyant. This is just the kind of short-lived, no-budget, Off-Off (independent) jewel of a play that lucky intrepid theatergoers discover on their own, gone long before end-of-year top-ten lists come out, and remembered long after.